Nadine Williams

A sunburnt country via the Ghan

But I want to know the very heart of our country, where the earth is red and the land becomes harsh, uninhabitable desert.

So we have cocooned ourselves in absolute style in a Platinum-class cabin where  I sink into my own posh soft-green upholstered chair, kick off my shoes, dig my toes into its plush carpet and choose a peach from a welcome fruit bowl. Our spacious love-nest (for we are not long married ourselves) is delightfully luxurious, lined in Cherrywood veneer with a self-contained hotel-standard en suite.. It would be perfect, except that we had to settle for two single beds instead of the usual standard-sized double bed, the last available cabin on the last train before the wedding. It will take us three days and two nights  rolling along almost 3000 kilometres of train track to reach the top end.  

The world of cities and suburbia slips quietly away as Ruth, the hospitality manager meets us all. Our train is the second-longest since the Ghan was extended from Alice Springs to Darwin and completed in 2004.  The train is 662 metres long and those 26 carriages, hauled by an NR109 locomotive a are like a 1627 tonne steel centipede carrying 197 passengers with six chefs and 25 staff on board.

I put my book aside for a moment and look out the wide window and watch as we  pass through picturesque wheat belt country, freshly ploughed fields, occasional pioneer cottage ruins and the bare hummock hills of South Australia’s mid north.

Mealtimes are big deal on board.  The Queen Adelaide Restaurant has lashings of Paris style where dining cubicles are all padded seats, etched glass and pretty curtains.

We join Perth couple of a certain age, Barb and David Greenlaw, order glasses of  Hill-Smith Estate Sauvignon Blanc. I order  caramelised onion and vintage cheese tart with salads, while monsieur, my French husband orders mustard and honey marinated breast of chicken. He is not amused when the wine does not arrive until his plate is half empty.

The Chocolate-whisky pudding with crème Anglaises is moist, rich and flavoursome and all is forgiven.

Beyond Port Augusta, at McLeay the dry land is sand and stubble, salt  bush and blue bush, and, surprisingly, we begin to see shiny little puddles of water on the parched earth and the blackened, tortured trees glisten with raindrops. “It has rained!’’ I cry in delight at this rare occurrence.  The earth is turned into deep ochre. We rumble along further and the odd watery patches  become a string of lagoons and dusty tracks are now mud. The beautiful bowl of blue sky minutes ago is now dark and ominous, a kaleidosocope of cloud formations. The bright, sunny landscape of an hour ago is now shrouded in an unlikely February mist. At Pimba, the whole bushland is soaked and I stare at the amazing metamorphosis until the rain spatters our window, smudging views .   Now we  hear the cloudburst bucketing down  over the growling of the train and an electric storm shoots sheets of lightening across the early-evening sky.  

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